IOMASA Streszczenie raportu

Interactive web-based user interface for data

An Internet based distribution system for ice, weather and ocean information has been set up. The system provides near real time access to a large variety of data about the polar environment in a standard user environment.

The amount of information available on the sea-ice, ocean and weather conditions for a particular region such as the Greenland Sea today is very large. However, the information is found in many different places, typically in incompatible formats that makes the task of optimally combining data into the desired set of information for a particular application very difficult. The applications vary from near real time usage for navigation, to off-line browsing of ice information for climate studies.

The task of this work thus was to process the information into common formats and build a browser that would allow user-defined views of the data. The Internet was the obvious data distribution medium and Java the programming language of choice because it allowed the generation of a tool that could be centrally maintained, and globally applied. Users will always get the latest version of the code. The JAVA run-time environment (Virtual Machine (VM)) is freely available for most platforms from Sun Microsystems (http://java.sun.com).

Specific target groups for the browser are companies involved in planning and/or carrying out navigation in ice frequented waters, ice services in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, scientific partners in various EC projects etc.